Welcome into another episode of The Extra Mile Podcast: Legislative Session, presented by The Mississippi Department of Transportation. I’m MDOT Deputy Director of Public Affairs Paul Katool. And as always, I am joined by my co-host Will Craft. He handles government and constituent affairs here at the agency. And Will, let’s dive right in. First, this episode is being recorded on Friday, January 20th.

Today, we’re welcoming back to the show the Lieutenant Governor of the State of Mississippi: Delbert Hosemann. He was elected in 2019 as Mississippi’s 33rd Lieutenant Governor, and he previously served as Mississippi’s Secretary of State. Governor, we know that it is a very busy time. Thank you so much for joining us today on the show.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Oh, it’s good to be here. Thank you very much. 33rd - it kind of makes you feel old, man. Who are the other guys, girls? I don’t know.

(Paul) Right. Right.

(Will) We certainly appreciate you taking the time. I know it’s a Friday folks, but that means nothing in the Lieutenant Governor’s office. They’re wide open.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) We had early morning meetings this morning working on rural health and discussing problems, significant problems, the state has with the rural health problems. And then we’ve done 600 bills been allocated so far in the last 72 hours. And so… they’re all long, by the way. We have about another 150 to do today and this weekend.

(Will) It’s pleasant reading material there.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) We’ll be on the working day.

(Will) I imagine so. Well, just real quick we’ll touch back on last year. It was a great session for MDOT. I think you guys had a great session over there, as well, you enjoyed. Everything went great.

Briefly looking back is our three-year plan we talked about ad nauseum. We’ve got a lot of projects on the street, and that is a big credit to the legislature, especially the senate over there getting the extra funds that we so desperately needed the resources. And I think we’re making progress, right? We’re coming along.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Well, um, I want to go from the map to the road.

(Will) Sure.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) And uh, we appropriated with the federal government as well about $2.2 or $2 million. We paid, the legislature as a group paid, for your maintenance up on $45 million for this year and next year in advance. So, we’ve already paid our maintenance in advance. So, we would hope that the maintenance would be done in advance.

And we also devoted $100 million to the emergency road and bridge fund which is utilized mainly by the counties, but some by the cities, as they come forward. And that’s done through a process an advisory council that you have and then, of course, come back to the commission and Brad to make the final decisions. But we have devoted more there than ever in the history of Mississippi.

We also matched the $40 million we needed to match for the $200 million for the federal money that came out in addition to our normal budget requirements, which are about $1 billion from the State. So, we have emphasized roads and bridges. And the last time I was here we talked about the fact that there is a gap between appropriation and dirt.

(Will) Sure.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) And it was very concerning to me that we were… that gap was too big.

(Will) Right.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) So, we talked with Brad a good deal about that, as well as the other commissioners, and I was proud of y’all to see that you did $963 million in contracts.

(Will) That’s right.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) That’s very important to our people if we’re going to take your tax dollars, and all of y’all are taxpayers. If we’re going to take your money, we need to see barrels and backhoes out on the streets. So, I’m very pleased with that.

I’m still, like y’all are I think, frustrated with the time between appropriation and being on the roads. The design team here and I came through MDOT, and I sat with a number of your people here in the office before, and I learned a lot about building culverts and stuff. It was outside my level of expertise, but anyway, I learned a lot about that.

And I don’t know if the slowdown is necessarily here, although I think we need to get into the sprint mode here. We have an opportunity where we have these funds, and we ought to be turning things that are our priorities from MDOT into actual work. So, we need to act, really accelerate, the process here further. I’m hopeful that you’ll break $1 billion in contracts this year letting those out. I’m hopeful that you’ll finish the preliminary work on 7, 15, I-55 from Hernando up to Southaven area short of Southaven area.

(Will) Right.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) There are a number of ones that are in that have been in the preliminary stage, and we’d really like to go play the game. We don’t need to be practicing anymore or any longer than we can. So, I’m very hopeful that we’ll continue to see an acceleration.

Now, a lot of the discussions have been that we get held up by the federal government. The federal want an opinion. They change about three different times, and we have problems with them, and then they change the rules on us 10 times and all like that. You know, really, that’s just part of the deal, I think. And y’all been good at it a long time, and so when they start that game, we need to, you know, their office’s down there on Capitol Street, I think. We just all need to go sit in the waiting room until they approve your plans.

(Will) Don, we’re coming to see you. You heard it here.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Right here. So, I do. I do hope that they will pick up the pace and really get in the game that you’re starting to play and really playing right now – which is we want to take the money that the taxpayers give us, and we want to put it in the dirt. And until we do that, um, we’re not really achieving what people hired us to do.

(Will) Right, and I think we’re just at such an opportune time right now. We’ve got the flush with funds that you just mentioned, and the opportunity’s there for to get out and get the work out and get it done. Speaking of -

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Set some records, man.

(Will) That’s right. Get that 964 bumping on up.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) I want to see one that has seven or eight figures in it.

(Will) That’d be awesome.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Maybe 1 billion or 10 billion or whatever. Go.

(Will) Well and speaking of pace of things like you’re experiencing right now – I know you guys are wide open across the street. Just came through the first deadline. What’s the first deadline for the folks out there?

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) That’s when you have to have them drafted and filed. Uh, drafting requests were due last week, and then the actual bills had to be filed this week. And so, we have all the bills filed that are general bills. Your appropriations bills are under a different calendar, so they’ll come later in the session. And we’re real hopeful that we’ll be out of here by the middle of March. We’re shooting to be through as quickly as we can this year and every year actually. So, we don’t, you know, we save money when we’re not here for taxpayers by not being in session. So, we’re hopeful to finish early.

But your appropriations bill for MDOT, for example, has not been, has not made it to lie today. Yet the general bills which involve criminal matters, civil matters, divorce matters, all kinds of other things - those are all have been filed and have met whatever the deadline is in the Senate and in the House. So, they’re out there matriculating. I think the House had about 2,000 bills. We’re probably going to end up with about 800. And so, you start with 2,800 or 3,000 bills by the time all of them are aggregated. That’s a lot to go through. And eventually probably only a few hundred of them will actually pass.

(Will) And that is just to put that in perspective again, we’re talking about a handful of folks and staff with Lieutenant Governor here about 3,000 bills in the matter of two weeks. So, lots of reading material. I know Andrew you’re keeping him busy over there with all those bills for sure.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Yeah. We have like six people working.

(Paul) Wow.

(Will) That’s a lot of reading.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Yeah. If you allocated out we do about $1 billion a person.

(Paul) Goodness gracious that is not insignificant. So, Governor, you know we obviously discussed took care of MDOT last year. Is there any other or any other transportation infrastructure-related kind of topics going through the legislature this year. I know we have electrical vehicles and that sort of thing going on.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Um, well, we can touch all of those. We are concerned about our ports and marines. That’s uh, you’ll see in the Mississippi River went didn’t go dry, but it went effectively dry. We couldn’t get out. We could not get our grain out to New Orleans to get it out to our world. Actually, in the war situation that’s going on with Ukraine it was particularly poignant that we do so. We were not able to do that by March, which is the most economical way to get things out: roads and bridges to the ports and harbors, and ports and harbors out to the world.

So, you saw the legislature last year put up significant funds to improve our ports and harbors. And I think you will see that again. Some of our rail transportation, particularly our local rail transportation to our new factories and those kinds of things rail, is also inexpensive, and by the way, we’re supportive of that because that means we don’t have to maintain the road now obviously. It’s a private entity.

And so, we are um, we’re very interested in making sure that we have rail transportation particularly to pick up a lot of our products. But our ports and marines will be a major factor - a contributing factor - this year. Last year we spent $40 million on creating new industrial sites. I thought that was really important. That goes though the Mississippi Development Authority. And it usually takes about $4 million or $5 million to get to have one flattened, and the water and sewer and electricity brought to it, and everything looks quite expensive to do all of that.

But most of these businesses now are making decisions and adjusting time. It’s kind of an “oh we’re just in time” inventory. You may have heard that, but they’re making these decisions right in an immediacy, and so they’re not interested in saying “we’ll go clear a site, and we’ll have everything ready for you in six months to a year.” You know, they’re like, “we need to build a factory, and where do you got one?” Well, we want to say, “we’ve got one right here, and it’s not shovel ready. It’s move-in ready.”

So, you’ll see us again, I think, in conjunction with the governor um selecting more sites to be really industrial size to be fully prepared for industry to come here because we have a number of different assets. Your roads, of course, are critical aspects of that. The water. If you go past Dallas, they don’t have any water. Like, they don’t have any water. So, so, we have an asset.

So, we have a number of different assets here in Mississippi: our people, our community college system. We’ve done accelerate which is how to train our people - putting a lot of money into that. I’d like to see community college be tuition-free. Several of them have attained that. You know community colleges. Now we want our kids to go into tuition-free, if they want to do that, and learn a trade or begin their preliminary graduate studies. So, all of those are impacting, and we’re working on all of those which will end up being part of our transportation package.

(Paul) Actually, that’s a great reminder that transportation infrastructure isn’t just roads and bridges. There’s a whole system there. So, of course this is an MDOT podcast, but we want to kind of get outside of transportation infrastructure a little bit. What other priorities do you have during the 2023 legislative session?

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Well, we have us, we have a number of issues, or “opportunities”, we like to think - um, well, the way I look at them. But we have issues in our rural health care, and yesterday the senate - I was just really proud of them - came out with a rural health bill that would allow where you’re not subject to antitrust provisions if small rural health care community hospitals merge together. I thought that was real important. And we came out with a plan in which to give them some money to really bridge the gap between where we are and where we’re going. And I’ll tell you about that in a second.
But I went to Greenwood and walked the hospital. That’s kind of the canary here. After it has rejuvenated itself to not have OBGYN there anymore, they have really downsized hospitals. Five floors - they’re down to three floors of actually being used, and some of those are offices for these doctor’s offices that they moved into the hospital. They are going to lose right at $20 million this year after they’ve downsized. So, it is not, um, it’s not financially viable to continue that.

All right. So, how do we go about making sure that we don’t have babies born in the back of trucks and stuff? Uh, you know, what is the challenges for those? So, no matter how good your roads are, babies don’t normally wait till they get to the interstate. So, we’re not, we’ve got to be careful about that. So, what we, what we’re looking at now is our process would allow our small rural hospitals to aggregate their assets and liabilities together, as you know, and have a physician that may be at one for every, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Friday and another place Tuesday, Thursday. They may have areas of expertise that do that kind of thing. We want all of them to have an emergency room and an OB and an internal medicine.

And but not necessarily if you’re having, you know, heart surgery. You can’t have that in every hospital or whatever. So, you’ll see, I think right sizing of the medical, the delivery of medical care, in Mississippi. And that will involve a lot of different things. Um, it’ll involve the major hospitals that we have - six or seven - that are really into this. Uh, those, and it’ll involve these smaller hospitals right-sizing to something that is to continue to be financially viable. And the federal government has come up with a program on rural health care hospitals. So, there’s a lot of work to be done in rural health care.

And I was real pleased with the Senate for taking the leadership to provide for scholarships for nurses that stay in Mississippi - like $6,000 a year for three years. $18,000 would pay off your debt if you’ll be a nurse. We’re about 3,000 nurses short, which, um, is a good economic life and also very viable maybe for somebody who wants to come to the workforce for a while and leave it maybe to raise a family, and then come back to the workforce, and you know, work part-time or whatever. There’s so many opportunities for that skill set.

When I was at Pearl River County a couple weeks ago at the community college there, they had 44 nurses in training. They had 200 applications.

(Will) Wow.

(Lt.Gov. Hosemann) So, as part of our program that was released just a day before yesterday, we’re encouraging our community college to use their infrastructure. And we’ll do infrastructure build-out to allow more nurses to basically get into school, and then, hit really the bedside where I really need you. And we don’t need to look further than Covid to look at that. Rural healthcare is a big deal, and we’ll be talking about taxes as well. We think we ought to send money back to the taxpayers this year. We’ve been very lucky - very lucky - about that. I’ll get into the financial assistance situation of the state when you’re ready to do that.

(Will) Oh, yeah. No. At any time, however you want to run with these topics. You’re hitting everything that we wanted to ask you about. I mean -

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) I can see your notes.

(Will) I know it. You’re right on top of everything. Well, one thing you mentioned in this conversation already but, uh, infrastructure-specific: water and sewer. And the focus that you guys are placing on getting the water and sewer repairs around the state.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Yeah. We - that’s another smart thing I think the legislature did. We told the cities and the counties, “if you’ll put money in, we’ll match it.” Now we got $1.8 billion, and the better we spent over a year. But, we took $1.8 billion, and we told $450 million of it, we told cities and counties, “if you’ll put up $450 million, we’ll put up $450 million.” So, instead of the state frittering this away some kind of way, we actually had $433 million’s worth of applications. So, there’s fixing to be about $900 million in long-term water and sewer, including Jackson, by the way.

(Will) That was my next question.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) So, there’s a lot of money being devoted out here and around. Then, we took another $300 million, and put it in rural water, so people outside of the major municipalities will have clean water. We thought that this is a generational change. And by the way, that works into the economics of bringing a factory here or whatever.

(Will) Sure.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Then we put like $75 million, which was a match with co-ops, $150 million in broadband all over Mississippi. So, we started as a broadband office, and we’ve got a federal dollars coming in this another, at least, another $100 million. And our co-ops have jumped in, and it’s been way more than $150 million now, and they’re probably closer to $300 million or $400 million. Getting out into rural broadband - that’s critical because we can’t, our kids can’t, get educated and a whole bunch of other things. We can’t even farm anymore without having access to the internet. So, we have a lot of that going on that’s real positive in the transportation area.

I was real pleased with that. We saved $350 million, which we did not spend that money, and we’ll come back to, I hope, generational changes.

(Will) Have you been pleased with the rural broadband rollout and expansion?

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) It has been, um, we, the co-ops, did a great job. The federal government now has given us a whole bunch of other money. They’ve asked - they’ve come up with, uh, what parts of Mississippi are not covered. And both Senator Sally Doty, where she’s head of this division now - of broadband, and I both dispute the federal government’s map of Mississippi. We think that we have significant other things that are not covered by broadband. So, she is employed to study, and we’ll be having it very shortly about what areas are actually gaps in the coverage. And that’s what we’ll be going to the federal government with. She’s doing a good job, and we should know that very shortly. I think in January, the 13th, actually, is a deadline for part of the application process that she’s doing.

(Will) Okay. So, the federal map shows us more covered than we think?

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Yes. Yeah. Like, a lot.

(Will) Oh, wow.

(Paul) Interesting.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Yeah. Some of that they give credit to the satellites. Like our people can get on satellite or whatever. But it’s, uh, she’s putting in our protest, and we’ll see. That’ll come back to how much money we get actually.

(Will) Okay. Something to follow. Yeah.

(Paul) No doubt. No doubt. So, uh, lots going on in the 2023 session. Kind of look back at your first term as lieutenant governor. Any kind of major accomplishments you want to tout?

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Well, I’m, um, I’m pleased Covid didn’t get everybody.

(Paul) That’s true.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) You know, it was just a horrible uh event for us. We struggled so much, and I thought the governor did a good job trying to balance people doing healthcare decisions and all of a sudden whether we get to do this or not and where you may wear a mask or not. So many of those decisions seem fainter now and foggier now as we’ve all gone past that. But Covid was a huge thing. The legislature, for the first time ever, stopped its session. We actually stopped in February and came back in June and then back again in the fall. It had never been done in our history. So, it was a demanding time, I think, to get anything done and then to worry about your fellow man and woman and legislature - whether they were going to be sick or - and we had several - Manly Barton from the house - would really just, really struggled.

A lot of us had had - I had Covid, and it was very debilitating. So, a lot of that struggle you seem to, you know, you seem to think that’s just gone. It’s not. Covid’s coming back in different strains and whatnot. We just have to take normal healthcare stuff. So, you know, I think that was one of the biggest.

The other things that we have done that nobody talks about: we have shrunk the size of government. We used to have 26 employees. We have 23 employees now. We have not borrowed any money in two years. That has never been done in the history of this state since 1817.

(Will) Wow.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) So, we, um, we have paid off $600 million in principle. Now, when you get to that, when you start looking at, we’re running the state government like a business that has also been foreign to state government. But by right-sizing our employees - and we gave raises to the ones that were here and were working hard - that’s appropriate.

Then we also have paid off debt. We have $2.7 billion in cash in the state government. 700 million of that is a rainy-day fund. $350 million of it is the American Rescue Plan that we have to use on infrastructure. But the rest of that is money that has come over the last year or so because, the first year we started, we reduced the budget by two percent. That was hard to do. And we went through Covid and all that other.
But we have come out making the state the best possible place for you and your children and my grandchildren to come and live and prosper. So, I think we are. We are in the best possible position we’ve been in.

In addition to that, during that time, we gave the largest teacher pay raise ever. I happened to be out, actually duck hunting with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas now. And she - we were talking about a lot of different things they were doing. We have a lot of the same issues. - but she was chatting me. She said, “You’ve put a lot of pressure on me because you’ve raised your teachers’ salary so much. You know, I’m gonna have to raise our teachers’ salaries.” And I thought, “isn’t this a great spot for Mississippi to be in?”

So, we raised teachers’ salaries. We had the largest tax cut ever. We’re the fifth-lowest tax cut of states that have taxes. I think they’re seven or eight or nine of them that don’t, but other ones - the forty something of them - we’re the fifth-lowest tax rate in the country and income taxes. So, we devoted all the money as we talked about to infrastructure: $2.3 billion. We devoted it to water and sewer and broadband and things that are being here forever.

So, in the last three years there has really been an epiphany in the way state government is run and its attitude towards generational changes versus “let’s just cobble together something that we can get out of here.” So, I’m real pleased, and that is a direct result I think of, um, 52 men and women in the Senate and 122 men and women in the House.

(Paul) Absolutely. Great to hear all that. Fantastic accomplishments, for sure. Jam-packed so far. Will, take us home.

(Will) And I’m just to say, I’m sure there if you guys have been the lieutenant governor he’s not one to harp on accomplishments. I’m sure there’s a laundry list of things he did not touch on. The man just finds a problem, solves it and moves on to the next one. And again, they’re wide open there.

Wrap us up here a little bit today. Last year we kind of asked you a food question. We’re gonna put a little spin on it this time. Not so much your favorite - you can certainly give us a favorite - but how about a new place? Have you been somewhere new that maybe just opened or that you had never been before to eat?

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Well, we, uh, when we had this, the last round of this, where the water shut off in Jackson, I thought it was a good idea to go to restaurants.

(Will) Sure.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) So, I went to Johnny T’s down on Farris Street down here. And I have become friends with Johnny and that. He came from Omaha here and, uh, went to Jackson State here, and he’s running his restaurant and stuff, and so I like to go down there and eat, you know, at lunch and stuff. And so, I’m down there and uh look over to the other table next to me, and it has “Coach Prime” on the table. And, sure enough, I’m having lunch there and fiddling around and talking to Johnny T or whatever and another senator we brought, and here comes Coach Prime. And so, he’s sitting there, and we’re “good to see you,” you know, “good luck this weekend,” you know. We’re just kind of like, normal. So, food’s great, and I, uh, I enjoy Johnny T’s. I’ve been back a number of times.

(Will) That’s great. I’ve actually seen it a thousand times, but I haven’t stopped in. We’ll have to pop in.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Gotta go by there. It’s just great.

(Will) I’ll have to remember that.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Bar’s open pretty much year-round.

(Will) We can remember that too.

(Paul) There you go. Yeah. We’ll take the podcast out to Johnny T’s.

(Will) That’s right.

(Paul) Governor, we really appreciate it. Great episode. Thank you so much for joining us.

(Lt. Gov. Hosemann) Good to see y’all. Thank you for having me. And y’all just work real hard, and make sure you stay in Mississippi. We’re making it a better place.

(Paul) No doubt. Love Mississippi. Alright, let’s go ahead, and wrap up. I want to thank our listeners out there for tuning in to The Extra Mile podcast, where you can watch and listen to episodes by visiting goMDOT.com/theextramile. Remember to follow us on social media at MississippiDOT, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Uh, we would like to thank our editor Drew Hall for making things go behind the scenes today for us. And without further ado, let’s wrap things up. Remember to drive smart out there on Mississippi highways.